“The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has told the New Humanistthat Reform UK leader Nigel Farage is misusing Britain’s Christian heritage “to channel anti-Muslim feeling”. He added that he has “some awkward questions” for Tommy Robinson about how his claimed conversion to Christianity in prison squared with “public rhetoric designed to produce hostility and violence”.
“Concerns about cynical manipulation of Christianity for political advantage are warranted, even from those who don’t share Dr Williams’s perspective as an out-and-proud “hairy Lefty”. Yet rather than simply damning this new enthusiasm for Christianity on the hard Right to the largely atheist readers of the New Humanist, might he be better advised to put his concerns to Farage and Robinson directly?
“For example, if Mr Robinson’s jailhouse conversion is sincere, then he will have to engage with the hardest sayings of Jesus Christ about loving one’s enemies, turning the other cheek, and forgiving others if one wishes God to forgive them. And, like other Christians, he will have to grapple with the challenging personal and theological implications of how often he fails to live up to those ideals…”
Thanks to the Church Times for publishing a short news piece from me on the hugely disproportionate number of Christians playing for Iraq’s second ever World Cup-qualifying squad—and also to its first World Cup outing, in 1986. A notably devout Christian, Ammo Baba, scored Iraq’s first ever international goal, against Morocco, in 1957, then coached … Read more
A perfect sunset, a chord by Fauré, the giggle of a baby, the stars on a dark night – all of those can give us the most extraordinary sensation, for which we use the word awe. We become aware that we have encountered something that is more glorious than the language we have to describe it – much greater in scale and complexity, much greater in beauty and moral grandeur. We sense that we are part of something far bigger than ourselves. Wonder mixes with fear. We are lifted up out of the drudgery of our routine lives. Yet we also realise how small we are; if we are lucky, our ego deflates a bit.
Awe is more than just a feeling. It seems to remind us of facts of life that we often forget. The universe is indeed vast; each one of us is small and lives for the briefest of spans; yet we are distantly related to all life on Earth; the complex elements that make up our bodies were forged in the furnaces of long-dead stars. Everything does indeed connect.
Much of contemporary life seems as if it were designed to minimise the number of times we experience that sense of awe, and from thinking too deeply about it when it does happen. The constant buzzes and beeps, the 24-hour TV schedule, and the infinite scrolling websites aim to keep us chained to our screens so we never notice what is beyond.
To notice the truth of our lives, we need to escape their humdrum.
Nikolai Ge, What is Truth? (1890). Hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Do they ever get under your skin, the men and women who hold power in our world? Those who casually snigger and sneer and tell obvious lies as they make decisions that will condemn many thousands to their deaths, or devastate the livelihoods of many millions.
Such powers in the land have always existed, although we didn’t always see their faces and hear their voices every day.
Pontius Pilate was such a power in the land. As Roman governor of Judaea, he only had to click his fingers and some of the finest troops the world had ever seen would be sent into action to do his bidding. Over non-citizens, such as Jesus and the apostles, he had the power of life and death. He wasn’t powerful because of any notable personal qualities of his, not as far as we can tell, but because of the Empire he represented.
You didn’t set yourself against the Romans lightly. They were extremely competent and effective, but also ruthless and unafraid of brutality. Their power rested on a reputation that left no doubt they would inflict terror on their enemies, and inflict it capably. That’s why the Jewish leaders started plotting against Jesus in the first place – they were worried that such a charismatic preacher and teacher would attract the wrong sort of attention from the Romans and provoke a bloody reprisal, especially a figure who was developing a name for acts of mysterious power.
Yet Jesus had no ambition for power, rejected violence, and committed no crime. That clearly unsettles Pilate. Clearly he isn’t afraid of a bit of brutality, but such manifest injustice seems a bit much for him. Still, a man of the world has to do what he has to do.
William Blake, The Wise and Foolish Virgins (ca. 1800). Owned by the Metropolitan Museum, New York; not currently on public display.
The story of the human race has been one where we gradually, but continually, amass more knowledge, more advanced technology – and more power. Even before writing was invented, we were already unique because of the wheel, the domestication of fire, the domestication of other species, and perhaps most of all speech. These things also made us uniquely deadly to other life forms. Our kingdom is very much of this world.
In recent generations, we’ve also potentially become lethal to ourselves. We’ve lived with the risk of nuclear war for 81 years now, and the wars unfolding in different parts of the world at the moment are frightening and violent events. Experiments in Genetic Modification of humans and other life forms are rapidly increasing in ambition and potential to do good, but also in risk of disaster. But it is Artificial Intelligence that is currently most in the public eye as a potential risk to our survival. One after another, some of the world’s top computer scientists – in many cases people instrumental to making Artificial Intelligence a reality – have either quit the field warning that it could lead to our extinction, or called for development to be slowed dramatically to allow adequate safety checks before AIs are made more powerful.
The logic of human relationships, however, is such that the two great empires of our time, China and the USA, must race as fast as they can to develop more powerful forms of Artificial Intelligence. This technology could be as transformative of human existence as the wheel, or fire, or speech, perhaps even more so. If one country blinks, it risks ceding the future to the other. Such are the constraints that govern how human kingdoms relate to one another.
The kingdom of God is different. It lives in its citizens often because of what they are and how they approach life as much as what they do, still less what they achieve. It doesn’t have a capital city or any fixed territory to defend.
There are three great stories in the demographics of the Christian world over the last two generations. One was widely heralded and remains much discussed, the other two are much less so.
One, is of course, the secularisation of the West. The second, a big part of my academic work, is the explosion in Christian numbers in Africa: from around 60 million at independence to something like 700 million today. The third is the move of millions of Latin Americans from Catholicism to Protestantism, usually Charismatic and Pentecostal forms of Protestantism, since around 1970.[1] Evidence is starting to build that, starting in the 2010s, there has been a change in direction. Catholicism has continued to lose both nominal and active adherents, but those leaving were less inclined to move toward Evangelicalism than out of organised religion altogether.
David Martin’s Tongues of Fire (1990) was the one of the first serious academic works on the subject in the UK, and has a place of pride on my bookshelf; in the USA, David Stoll’s Is Latin America Turning Protestant? of the same year possibly had more impact.[2]
The gathering turn to Protestantism emerged during a tumultuous period in Latin American Catholic life, with the rise of Liberation Theology among what had been a reactionary clerisy in the 1960s and then its shattering from above under the pontificate of John Paul II. While Liberation Theology claimed to speak for the poor, it was during its ascendancy that the continent’s impoverished legions, long underserved by priests, started looking elsewhere for spiritual sustenance. “The Catholics opted for the poor and the poor opted for Pentecostalism” runs the old canard.
But departures to Pentecostalism accelerated further in the decades since Latin American Catholicism’s renewed tack to the Right: and it was a modest tack – the shift should not be overstated; there was no return to the reaction of the first part of the 20th Century.
How great is the scale of the departure from Catholicism in Latin America? Catholic identification dropped from approximately 90% in the 1960s to 70% in 2010, and further to 57% by 2020.
Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Christ Church, Bulkington
Readings – Acts 2. 1-21; John 14. 8-17
“how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia…”
Giotto, Pentecost (1290-9). In the Basilica of St Francis, Assisi, Italy.
Hearing today’s reading about the Parthians, Medes, and Elamites reminded me of a Pentecost a few years ago in a Church in Belfast. I heard this passage read with a strong and distinctive accent—not mine, but an accent that as distinctive in Belfast as it would be in Wiltshire. It turned out this accent came from the land of the Parthians, Medes, and Elamites—some of whom heard the apostles preach in their own languages at the first Pentecost. The lands that were once Parthia, Media, and Elam have been part of Iran for over a millennium, and the lesson was read by a member of what is by now a large Iranian community in Belfast, many of them converts to Christianity.
When the Iranian revolution took place in 1979, there were only around 170,000 Christians in the country, mostly from the ancient Assyrian and Armenian communities. While they were given a protected minority status by Ayatollah Khomeini’s government – as long as they kept their heads down – severe repression was unleashed against the small number of converts from Muslim backgrounds and the churches they belonged to. The Anglican priest in the city of Shiraz, Arastoo Sayyah, was murdered at his desk within eight days of the Revolution. The repression has come in waves since. Right now, a mother of two young children and convert to Christianity named Aida Najaflou has been locked up in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison for four months facing trumped-up charges of “acting against national security”.
We would expect a Church facing such persecution to be in terminal decline. Yet, while tens of thousands of Christians have fled Iran into exile, whether as refugees or after securing work in other countries, the Church in Iran is numerically stronger than it has been for many centuries.
If you told the average person in the UK that hundreds of thousands of people in Iran had converted from Islam to Christianity, they’d probably refuse to believe you. But God continually upends our expectations of what is possible.
Nobody is quite sure how many people have come to faith in Christ in Iran from Muslim backgrounds over the last thirty years or so. Some sceptics claim no more than a few tens of thousands, while some enthusiastic evangelicals claim numbers in the millions. Article 18, a UK-based charity which advocates for religious freedom for people of all faiths, says a “conservative” estimate is that there are between half a million and 800,000 converts to Christianity in Iran. Research carried out anonymously on the Internet in 2020 by sociologists in the Netherlands from a non-religious perspective estimated that 1.5% of Iranians considered themselves Christians, implying just over a million converts from Muslim backgrounds.
